The “Penguin Update” - How Can I Recover?

5 days ago, on April 24th, the rankings on several sites that I co-own have significantly dropped. It happened the same day that Google announced: http://searchenginel...-results-119295 so it's obviously the reason.

I suspect that the reason is that some of the SEO firms that we used to work with, over the years, have built many links which are not of the highest quality.

The question is: what can we do now? should we try and trace those low quality links and remove them?

How badly is your traffic effected and how google reliant is your website? If I had a site with a 90% google reliance and pages that were hooked up with shady links, I would be inclined to dump the page and give the content a spit and polish and before relaunching it. If however the links are pointing directly at the .com that would be futile and the entire issue becomes more complicated.

What ever the case your not alone and many sites are going to be tussling with the issue. When looking for new and quality links, keep in mind your trying to repair your sites link profile so aim for diversity in anchor text and attempt to look natural. That sounds very vague but googles aim with this update was to purge unnatural link profiles, so you need to strive for a good mix of links from authoritative and lesser sites, hope the links come back to a variety of locations not just the main page. You would in a perfect world want, citations of your content, some social media mentions, some links back to a review or product (if you have such) and a mix of links to various pages. Its going to be very hard to construct by hand and you will probably have to rely on organic methods. So be certain your content is original and link worthy and begin looking at ways to get it out there via sharing platforms/social media if you keep at it, your profile will turn around and ultimately be stronger for it.

You will also want to ascertain how much of your content has been duplicated and address it immediately. Check your site for other signs of over SEO such as keyword stuffing in meta-tags, over use of repetitive heading tags and overly specific page titles. All small issues but the best repair job is one done to perfection :-).

Its a tricky time and information on hand is largely best guess or drawn from a few sources but the above is currently the soundest advice I have anyway.

You are of course completely correct Jill, it simply cannot be argued.
However when some one is actively seeking to revive a site they may choose to attempt to fast track the linking process for better or worse. More over there are niches that are not always conducive to creating a 100% organic profile, although I maintain it can always done. Can it be done in a realistic time frame and effectively enough to counter act SERP penalties? Well we do not even know how much of a long term penalty an ailing link profile is going to pass on yet. So that is an opened question.
More over though and more importantly I think I misspoke slightly there, better put would have been you need to get your overall backlink profile back to appearing/looking natural. So if its currently very shady looking you will need to inject a good amount of quality links and positive off sight signals into it.

After the penguin update, everyone can see very poor serps for many, many keywords ..

There are even blank pages ranking for competitive terms.

Since April 24th, I didn't even add one single article to any of my websites, simply because I thought : why do that ? what difference will it make ?

All the talk for years about quality content, social media signals etc .. it seems that it doesn't even matter now.

The question is, how to "believe" again ?

It's just a genral question, I'm not arguing about any type of my websites that got slapped, because one of them is 15 years old, quality, unique content built over the years, not a single link building campaign , all the links came to the website naturally, literally millions of backlinks, some from state.gov , bbc.co.uk , about.com etc .. you get the picture.

One by-product of this that I have noticed is that SMEs without a budget to spend on Guruism are now getting a fair crack of the whip.
Many of them have straight forward quality sites built to project their products and services with only "Earned Links".

Previously because the couldn't afford to pay someone to obtain 150,000 links, their SERPs were not as good as those sites that did pursue links as the be all and end all of SEO.

Nice to now see more reward for quality content and less reward for the 'manipulationists'.

I still don't see any of these "problems" with the results I get from any searches, but as I've said before I don't search to see where 'my site' is nor do I do any searches for one or two words that are in the spammiest crap holes imaginable. If you search for junk you are going to find junk.

Jill ,what do you mean by "a lost traffic site audit"? Where can I apply for such an audit?

I can say that for [my site] the organic traffic has decreased by more than 50%

For keywords like 'photo to painting' or 'painting from photo' we used to be ranked 1st for years (we are the leading website in this niche, so we really should be ranked 1st). Now we rank 5 and below for all those major keywords of this niche.